Target Practice: Who are we talkin’ to?

I think we’ve pretty much narrowed out idea (finally) down to the problem of anonymity in the online environment. What this means is, we have to start thinking about our target audience and who we are actually speaking to with this feature (“You talkin’ to me?” says DeNiro).

Dean (2010) sees blogs (and by extension, I guess, online features) as emerging out of a missing “subject supposed to know”. If we view our blog in this way, what we want to provide information to people who think The Silk Road is completely anonymous and either want to access it or are skeptical of it because of this fact. As users usually don’t find exactly what they want from a Google search (i.e. they don’t search the semantics of a query as shown by Finkelstein (2008)) our feature will pop up as a related and important source of information to keep these users informed about the real mechanics of data collection and potential tracking and whether or not you can really be anonymous online.